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07-12-2017, 09:14 PM
Eira.
There is a strange hum in the atmosphere, silent, resonating beneath skin, through bone, with beguiling effect.
It holds a chilling vibe, sings a thrilling, foreboding song into the thrum of listening hearts…
The eerie weight, the unfathomable sensation, is enough to cause the white-speckled hair along the sleeping filly’s spine to stand on end. Darkness has smothered distant regions, lands neighbouring their tranquil stretch of beach, driving wild panic through the blooming population of Helovia; like ravenous fog it advances noiselessly even now, across the writhing fury of waves (roar, crash), slithering with insatiable intent towards them, devouring all light and terrain - aiming for her helpless frame, sprawled through cool sand, motionless, oblivious.
She stirs though.
A quickening heartbeat (entranced by queer mood), drives her from the grip of fond dreams and into the wild reality of chaos (kaos), and devastation. There is a fleeting second as adrenaline ignites life through her veins, that terror cracks all sense - where is Ma? Pa? Tiny grey hooves strive through the sand, burying beneath her slender roan barrel as it already heaves and jerks, backwards and forwards, desperate for height. “Indra!” frightened vocals extend, splitting the back of her throat until it burns, aches; she gasps then, desperate for air.
In the fading light there is movement. The familiar hue of hot, coltish breath envelopes her anxious expression and he is there, beside her, guiding her like a beacon of light through the cloud of her own apprehension. Trembling nostrils suck greedily at that cherished flavour, aiming to burrow against the tender throat-latch; an affectionately formed habit which had brought comfort and refuge, many times already.
“S’happening?” feathery voice queries, feebly, weakly, groggily, stumbling on until her bony, feathery arm is pressed close into his warmth. “…where’s Ma?” Creeping shadow hinders the suggestion of day and she feels as though dawn has arrived with a hideously leaden face, or perhaps she has slept the whole day through… Regardless, her stomach groans and grumbles; twists nervously to the foul, inaudible rhythm in the air, and she wants vainly, impulsively to suckle.
There is an echo in the air, it grows by the second; like the perverted trill of prey before the kill.
Lanky legs scramble north-west through the sand (they have no choice, nothingness licks wickedly at their heals), following the faint trail of splattered milk where it lingers, souring in the thickly-brackish air. Though oblivion’s hand wipes away the world right behind them, a sickly-sweet light grows through the timber ahead; it is unsettling, unnatural, but like the sea is pushed and pulled by the magnetic moon, the hapless foals are dawn hopefully, curiously.
A voice booms in the distance - it bleeds from the earth, rides the coursing wind and leaks through her trembling conscience. The filly hesitates with wings turned askew, “Pa?” she bleats, shaken, voice quivering wildly with worry. Sweat, pungent, potent fear, poured rivulets through her coat and though he stood firmer, Indra too shed bountiful concern; their own taste lathered metallic on her tongue.
There!
Spindly shafts of that luring light pulled them in and through the clutter of old wood and marsh (the stench of death and revolting decay), more than two dozen of their kind were amassing. Maddened by confusion and the thrilling promise of food, Eira starts brazenly forward. Sharp, narrow flints slice easily through the slough, but her brother, swifter, smarter, cuts forth like a shrewd wall of clarity. She stumbles before him, slumping into the fetid water with all of the harshness of a fallen boulder; disconcerted snorts erupt, confused, dismayed, but there is no mistaking the sober warning masking his face.
In that moment she pauses, heeds the truth of the unfolding event as it balloons like noxious gas around them.
The screams; she has mistaken their blood-curdling pain, the anger, for jubilance!
A sequence of stunning explosions occur, bright black and teal - one near to that charming glow, the other further away, to one side - and then for a time nothing; only the resounding thunder, that supernatural voice and the omen it proclaims upon them all. It becomes apparent as she stares bewilderedly, that a massive creature stands at the midst of the mayhem and it is to this, mammoth, that the frenzy of action is aimed.
There are bodies everywhere, streaking through the dead sky overhead, and littering the swampland (upon which the twins dither). An overbearing accumulation of stinking, fermenting hormone presses down around her shoulders like a wearying, weighted blanket, and she shakes her flinching, shivering skin in an effort to be free. The horror of the scene unfolding sears her mind, soul, and squeezes the (small) sensibility her fraying baby heart.
“Oh Indra!”
So too does she notice then, that the vivid explosions are more than stark light. Molten tears well behind the lower rims of each burning eye and soon enough, saline channels are weaving gravity's cursed path down her chiselled blue cheeks. Sobbing, the filly turns to the stalwart figure of her brother; though cracks in his enviable resilience are undeniably present, he watches with a lofty skull bearing witness to all that unfolds - certainly, the resolve portrayed is better set in concrete, than that of his twin.
While stress ricochets through his core, leaping the lost divide between his frame and hers, Eira finds solace in his warmth and steadier mind; vision - so real - of their first living moment descends to interrupt the peril; the time when she had flailed like a lowly lamb in the breeze of new life, Indra’s gentle breath was the first touch she had known.
The sting of shock, the shrill devastation in his voice when it erupts, turns her blood stone-cold.
Above them - wielding like a missile above the monster - their Ma vanishes amid the same, life-eating ball of black and teal light. Below, Cirrus’s daughter’s scream unites with the sound of the terrorised crowd and her body collapses into the watery bed, wracked by convulsing, consuming cries. Likewise, mere moments later, red, tear-glazed gaze beholds the undoing of their Pa; his body, pristine in the rising night, dissolves beneath a gut-wrenching flash.
Their energy and want to defend, though valiantly construed, is futile in the end. The world seems to pause in those seconds, sound numbed from awareness and time knocked from its course.
A feverish, frenetic pulse throbs to the tune of flaring hopelessness, and hunger; of abandonment and trepidation. What were they to do? How would they continue? Yet, as the cataclysm reaches its climax, an answer fashions in the form of an invisible funnel, a vacuum, sucking them from their mortal existence in Helovia.
Still slouched through marsh, Eira is helpless as she endeavours to struggle free of her bind. She can see through a haze of grief and agony, that Indra too is at the mercy of this wretched force; and with splayed wings she makes one final effort to be with her brother. All of the strength she can muster is spent lurching towards him, milk teeth snap savagely, desperately, clinging to the silken tuft already spilling from his tail's tip.
“Please…” she weeps bitterly, clenching her eyes as the light drowns her vision. “Indra! Don’t lea…” "I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter." |
@Indra
